Weird Science retracts its penis to keep everyone guessing

Ever wonder about the consequences of your penis not being retractable? Wonder no more. Fortunately, a team of Australian researchers are willing to lay it out for us: "Before clothing, the nonretractable human penis would have been conspicuous to potential mates." Since clothing is a relatively recent development, there's a chance that its conspicuousness made a mark on human evolution, either in terms of male anatomy or in terms of female tastes. The authors grabbed a database from a study of the Italian male population and used it to make computer-generated male bodies. They showed them to a mixture of university students, campus staff, and random volunteers they recruited.

And, at least on some level, the results indicate that women do like a larger penis. But the effect tails off quickly once the penis passes a given length, with the critical measurement being influenced by body height (the taller the person, the bigger the penis had to be). Complicating matters, women liked tall men, as well—it had just as strong an effect as penis size. So, that helped drag the preferred penis size to even greater lengths than it would have been otherwise.

If you're emotionally attached to a Web service, using pot may be one of the least of your problems. A survey was used to check which of four factors was associated with college students growing emotionally attached to using Facebook. It came up with a simple answer: all of them. Loneliness, anxiousness, alcohol, and marijuana use were all associated with getting attached to using the service, while loneliness and anxiousness were associated with establishing a lot of connections on it. Elsewhere in the same journal, we have a demonstration that Facebook users are narcissistic. But they're also more extroverted and less lonely than non-users.

Spring, when a young person's thoughts turn to thinking that their OCD was just a case of Internet hypochondria. You've probably heard of Google's Flu Trends, where the company attempts to track the spread of the seasonal flu based on the number of searches involving typical symptoms. Now, some researchers have gone and checked for seasonal trends in mental illness, and boy, did they find some. That's not to say that mental illness spreads like a virus. Instead, we're all apparently just a lot happier in the summer than we are in winter. Anxiety shows the smallest inter-seasonal difference while the largest is eating disorders, which change by a hefty 37 percent as the winter fades into summer.

Giant women, but proportional. There are lots of species where females are larger, on average, than males. But there was no case as apparently extreme as the giant moa, a flightless bird native to New Zealand that was hunted to extinction after the arrival of humans. The males of the species were pretty large, weighing up to 85kg. But the females were positively monstrous, topping out at 240kg. The size difference was so large that the two were originally classified as different species. What caused this huge disparity? Nothing more than the huge size.

Looking at existing ratites (the group of flightless that included moas), larger females are the norm and the ratio of male to female body size varies within a typical range. It's just that when you blow things up to enormous scales that the normal difference between the sexes starts working out to be hundreds of kilograms.

Beer as an indicator of scientific progress. Letters to the editor are usually chances for readers of journals to, well, editorialize a bit. And, somewhat surprisingly, given its title ("A global comment on scientific publications, productivity, people, and beer"), this letter does have some serious points. Still, they're made within the context indicated by this graph, which shows that scientific achievement and beer consumption go hand-in-hand. The author says that beer is just an indicator, not a cause, of scientific achievement. However, he suggests that healthy funding of science might eventually decouple the two as, with enough research funding, "perhaps scientists would then drink less."

Regarding the male reproductive organ size and women's preference - I'm not worried about this at all. Ya see, apparently these scientists have not seen "The Ski Lift" episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. The problem is actually women with unusually large female anatomy down there.

Re: Seasonal trends in mental illness - I think this is quite obvious to us mental health suffers who live in seasonal climates like here in England. It's nice to see it backed up by science.

During winter when it's cold, snowy and depressing outside, my depression is also at it's deepest (I can only imagine it's even worse if you suffer from SAD). And then when Spring appears, my mood brightens like clockwork.

Ever wonder about the consequences of your penis not being retractable?

When Zeus upset, we'll ended up with nothing. So please Dr, keep our silences on this one? :-)

Quote:

And, at least on some level, the results indicate that women do like a larger penis.

Ah.. something wrong with this statement. The women prefer the right size penis. Sizes that fit them well and not too overly, excessively stretch.. Hmm.. too much?

Here's the story to prove it I was right about women prefer the right size, not bigger, not smaller, just the right size: Some guy asks a young prostitute how much would it be for a trick.

"$20."

"I have a 14".

"$100".

Your analogy about the size was way off. Dr. :-)

About clothing: We have clothing long before we knew we have penis. Human invented clothing for the cold temperatures, and nothing else. So much, much later in times, maybe tenths of thousand of years after we have learned the importance of our penis, and so at that time we have decided to have these penis protected. Not because we were ashame of their sizes, the idea of covering the penis was to kept the bee away? :-)

So basically, those attached to facebook are lonely anxious alcoholics sitting in their room smoking marijuana.

I knew it!

Taking this into account, if you have a small penis then look for a lonely anxious alcoholic woman who uses facebook and just finished smoking pot because they will have lower expectations and have the munchies

They should have thrown stupid into the equation too because there are people so wrapped up in facebook they can get physically aggressive and potentially violent if you say anything about it. I had one guy actually take a swing at me several months ago because he was upset over some person not wanting to friend him on facebook. After having his arm broken i'm pretty sure he will think twice next time.

there's a chance that its conspicuousness made a mark on human evolution, either in terms of male anatomy or in terms of female tastes

If it left a mark, it would have to be on human anatomy -- as most women will attest, our tastes are based on a mix of what's most pleasurable when all else is equal (based on experience & other women's firsthand tales) and what we're told by society is supposed to be. The "bigger is better" idea is only remotely accurate in that longer penises are often thicker; it doesn't take all *that* much to reach the point in either measurement where it becomes painful instead, and for most women it doesn't hold a candle pleasure-wise to the clitoris unless the dude's perfectly shaped/aimed to affect the g-spot.

Guys bigger is not always better. As a gay dude there's a minimum size one has to be for it to be "fun" (I'd say anything between 5-7.5) but anything over a certain length (8) and you just go "umm this is not fun I don't even know what to do with it and it's too large to wield."

Also, the study doesn't delve into "growers" vs "showers". Some dudes have smaller penis sizes when flaccid but can become huge when erect, and vice versa. So seeing a large di*k in the showers doesn't necessarily mean that guy's junk is larger than yours when erect.

Re: Seasonal trends in mental illness - I think this is quite obvious to us mental health suffers who live in seasonal climates like here in England. It's nice to see it backed up by science.

During winter when it's cold, snowy and depressing outside, my depression is also at it's deepest (I can only imagine it's even worse if you suffer from SAD). And then when Spring appears, my mood brightens like clockwork.

Here in central France I asked the HR Director about SAD, on the theory that, given that we can go for weeks at a time here without seeing the sun, we should have some number of SAD sufferers in the factory. She looked at me as if I had two heads and started telling me about light therapy. I did not succeed in getting her to understand that I was not the one with the problem.

Re: Seasonal trends in mental illness - I think this is quite obvious to us mental health suffers who live in seasonal climates like here in England. It's nice to see it backed up by science.

During winter when it's cold, snowy and depressing outside, my depression is also at it's deepest (I can only imagine it's even worse if you suffer from SAD). And then when Spring appears, my mood brightens like clockwork.

Here in central France I asked the HR Director about SAD, on the theory that, given that we can go for weeks at a time here without seeing the sun, we should have some number of SAD sufferers in the factory. She looked at me as if I had two heads and started telling me about light therapy. I did not succeed in getting her to understand that I was not the one with the problem.

Not seeing the sun because of bad weather or because the number of daylight hours are sharply diminished? Because my understanding is that SAD is related to the number of daylight hours.

Apes and many other animals have non-retractile penises too. So how come they think it affected human anatomy but not our tiny-dicked cousins?

Compared to other primates, humans have the biggest penis size. One of the reasons for this is humans tend to have sex on missionary position, which require a longer penis than other positions that the other primates have sex and made a change in male anatomy during our evolution.

Re: Seasonal trends in mental illness - I think this is quite obvious to us mental health suffers who live in seasonal climates like here in England. It's nice to see it backed up by science.

During winter when it's cold, snowy and depressing outside, my depression is also at it's deepest (I can only imagine it's even worse if you suffer from SAD). And then when Spring appears, my mood brightens like clockwork.

Here in central France I asked the HR Director about SAD, on the theory that, given that we can go for weeks at a time here without seeing the sun, we should have some number of SAD sufferers in the factory. She looked at me as if I had two heads and started telling me about light therapy. I did not succeed in getting her to understand that I was not the one with the problem.

Not seeing the sun because of bad weather or because the number of daylight hours are sharply diminished? Because my understanding is that SAD is related to the number of daylight hours.

True enough, hobgoblin, but Chartres lies at 48 deg. north latitiude, so winter days are shorter than in most of the northern US.